On Friday, 14 February 2014 at 09:09:42 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
But that would mean that you have to pull the implementation of
casts and other features that rely on TypeInfo right now into
the library too. Do you really think this such a good idea? My
biggest concern with this is, that when TypeInfo is pulled into
phobos, the implementation of TypeInfo is going to depend on
_all_ phobos modules, making at lot harder to use D without
phobos unless you want to rewrite the entire TypeInfo and all
features depending on it.
I think Adam would have to clarify what he meant by "the
library". I'd like all the TypeInfo stuff in the runtime, not
phobos. According to a conversation I had with Iain Buclaw [1],
the TypeInfo implementations are broken into two parts: There's
the TypeInfo implementations in object.d/di and then there's the
TypeInfo implementations in D runtime's src/rt/typeinfo folder
[2].
I don't understand why the two are separated. Iain just said the
ones in object.d "are required to be known at compile time for
certain operations."
I'm too much of a D novice to understand the implications of
Adam's proposal, but if it's feasible, I think it would be be
quite useful to those porting D to more limited platforms like I
am. Currently I'm fooling the compiler with silly things like...
class TypeInfo_Class : TypeInfo
{
ubyte[68] ignore;
}
... and that's a dirty hack if I ever saw one.
The runtime might be a good place for it given the consequences
you've just articulated. The bottom line, I think, is to get it
out of the compiler.
Mike
[1]
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
[2]
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/tree/master/src/rt/typeinfo
